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January 09, 2009

Bedroom (Re)Discoveries

In my old room over Christmas, I found myself rifling through a small stack of abandoned mixes from my collegiate tail-end of the 90s. Not too mortified by the gulf between current and discarded tastes, I have to say. While there were some clunkers that I'm keen to never mention again, to anyone, there were also tasty little Napster-era rarities that I haven't thought about in years, to my detriment. A couple, from two pillars of my college soundtrack...

Belle & Sebastian - "Pocketbook Angel" (demo)

Lurking beneath the Times New Viking levels of angry tape hisssss is a sweet trifle from Stuart Murdoch, from the days when he was short on press photos and long on briliiant EPs. Sad that this countrified almost-rocker never made a single one. All of his songs from that time were amazing for the ways in which they carefully avoided aggrandizing their subjects as anything but ordinary, underemployed layabouts, and yet you still found the protagonists to be perfect fodder for friendship/courtship daydreams. In real life, if an office coworker were to perpetually fake a limp, just to be "goofy," it'd probably irk me to no end. In the context of the song, picturing a bespectacled Scots lass and projecting myself back to sophomore year headspace, it's hard to avoid being smitten. Also, Stuart Murdoch circa 1998 predicts a couple years of my "professional" life with these lines;

Oh, sure, I had a job in an office once/ I never talked to anyone/ All I ever do is sit around

Radiohead - "Big Boots" (live)

This was among the scores of songs feverishly traded by post OK Computer fanatics, that had the unintended effect made Kid A initially more alien and confusing than it actually is. Where were all those guitar songs we'd been listening to for months? Would they seriously just rot on the vine, brilliant but unloved? Yup. Well, "Big Boots" or "Man O War" as it was sometimes called, doesn't strike me as a work of divine inspiration like it did when I was 18, but it still crashes and crests in that swell, adolescent Bends way. It's also notable as the most blatant manifestation of Thom Yorke's enduring unease around insects in general, and worms in specific. Beyond the tiny bugs causing "Myxomatosis" or the crushed bug used as an analogy for your sad little 1997 life in "Let Down," we've got the Yorke-assisted UNKLE's "Rabbit in Your Headlights," with its "white worms in the underground" to watch out for. Recently, In Rainbows' "Weird Fishes," offers proof that Yorke's carnivorous worm-phobia persists to the present. In "Big Boots" though, we've got presumably Dune-sized worms who "WILL come for you," and "WILL eat you whole." I've always found his fixation a little weird and silly. I mean, I assume its a metaphor for some existential "death trumps all" dread, but the constant repetition suggests a horrific encounter with some boy's school bullies and a bag of nightcrawlers. Oh well, this was back when Greenwood's guitars always sliced and rumbled just right and the teenage mopeyness of it all is kind of charming in a nostalgic way.

Posted by Jeff Klingman at January 9, 2009 04:59 PM

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